@Kcmatt7 Well I have an Idea as to why the NCAA isn’t saying anything til april, MONEY. If some of these top programs are gonna get hammered, they don’t want the tournament numbers to suffer at this point. That to me is the interesting point, several top teams have players or former players on several lists that have been released. It would bad business for brackets not to include Kansas, Duke, UK and Arizona. Personally I think Arizona is trying to find the right fall guy by firing all these assistants. Whats crazy is it hasn’t hurt their recruiting as it appears that it hurt ours. Right now Arizona has the number 1 class for next year.

@Texas-Hawk-10 It can’t be done. They screwed themselves by letting outside money in. Shoe companies and TV run the NCAA and it’s institutions. Not the other way around. It’s a complete farce. A facade.

The only way to enforce it now is to strip TV rights from schools/conferences. And develop a generic apparel brand that provides all gear for the schools. If that happened, the NCAA wouldn’t exist because they couldn’t justify giving more money to one school over another. And therefore the P5 would leave. And the P5 and their fanbases are the sole reason they have a $1B a year TV deal for the NCAA tournament.

The NCAA doesn’t care about amateur athletics. And there is nothing amateur about D1 sports anymore at all. Even the Olympics recognized it was an issue once too much money came in and sponsors all wanted a piece. So they adjusted their rules to encourage compliance.

As far as I know, Beaty is the only one that has been told he will not be coaching, all the other coaches and personnel are still technically employed and should be doing what is expected of their positions. I read somewhere that Bowen and Hull have been recruiting.

Defense was Svi’s main issue, so showing that he can at least hold his own against bigger guys helps his stock because he has struggled to guard smaller, quicker guys. If you can’t move down the spectrum, you have to be able to move up the spectrum on the defensive end.

@jaybate-1.0 That is quite a twisted inference from my post. Let me try again, based solely on how I think about it:

I suspect Cal may be dirty based on some of the people around him. I do not suspect HCBS of being dirty. If forced to conclude one way or the other, I would have to conclude there is no firm evidence of either being dirty.

As to whether they themselves suspect any players of illicit benefits, I hope and assume that they would investigate any hints or evidence coming their way, and I believe we have seen that. But I do not expect them to spent all their time being forensic accountants or financial cops, or turning kids down because they made the KU choice late in the game. (Are we suspicious of Shady’s last-minute dream?)

————————————

Your response above and some of your recent previous responses made me wonder the following:

1.) Was your response convenient?

2.) Was it projecting about my post being twisted?

3.) Are you in actuality suspicious of Shady’s last-minute dream and what *firm evidence” makes you be suspicious or were your words just conveniently mentioning that?

4.) Do you have firm evidence indicating your recently claimed number of 90% of Buckets posters thinking what you claim they think regarding Cal?

REGARDLESS: thanks for taking the time to “try again” to help me understand your POV “based solely on the way you think about it”.

It made me wonder. And that’s good.

Hang in, eventually the authorities will get this sorted out!

Be of good cheer.

As a layman, I have long suspected all the observable asymmetries and the likely apparently unobservable activities apparently required to enable the observable asymmetries and anomalies were likely manifestations of probably legal apparent entertainment values in operation. I strongly doubted illegal conspiracy as an explanation of very much, if anything at all. All but proven conspiracy theories are mostly for suckers IMHO.

BUT…since the FBI/DOJ apparently suspect (allege? charge?) something illegal is operating, well, I am a layman willing to take a dutiful wait and see attitude, so they can do an ethical, professional job of investigation and adjudication.

It saddens me to think there may be a vast illegal/criminal conspiracy that has college sports generally in its dastardly grip. I am flabbergasted that anyone suspects Bill Self could be one of its criminal masterminds, or even stooges.

But the end of the Cold War and record declassifications reputedly now show the McCarthy Era, vicious and opportunistic as it reputedly was at times, turns out was apparently not totally a witch hunt. There really were communists and communist informants in our government, same as there are reputedly foreign assets and informants in high and low places today.

So: I suppose it’s possible Jay Wright, Coach K, Cal and Self could all be criminally masterminding everything. It’s possible Russia, or PRC, or even tiny Israel has turned them all. But I still doubt it. Don’t you?

Nevertheless, I enthusiastically support a fair, legal and ethical investigation and adjudication by the FBI/DOJ. Heck, I would even like to see a commission plus all levels of law enforcement investigate sport for the criminal and Intel money laundering I suspect could conceivably be going on in college sports betting, even though if I were forced to choose, I would probably choose that it was probably not going on.

@DoubleDD But also remember what I said … that using the IRS issues is a way to apply pressure. So while I don’t believe that was the impetus of the prosecution, I do think it could come up later as pressure is applied.

@jaybate-1.0 And to your point, a reason I think we are now better than last season’s team, and why we succeeded to get to the final four, is that we have an inside offensive game. One that demands respect. Last season, how threatening was Lucas? He just wasn’t. Good rebounder, but the opposition was surely hoping he took the shots.

@JayHawkFanToo Well, true haha. I guess it starts with the owners really…

I mean they expect loyalty, yet don’t show it themselves. Forces the players to act the same way. Or rather, their agents. But Boras is far and away the worst of the worst. They type of guy that would offer you a piece of gum and then a week later you’d get a bill in the mail for it, plus 20% interest lol.

@Gunman There’s going to be at least one non senior leave the program after this season. Whether it’s an early entrant or a transfer, KU currently has 14 scholarships committed to next season which means someone, my money would be on either Vick or Cunliffe, transfers out of the program.

This is correct. It became the case once Agbaji committed. Given that KU is still recruiting Romeo and took some other looks, there is speculation 2 will leave. I’d love to see Newman hang around though.

There is a basic, often overlooked difference between great coaches like Self, Knight, K, Cal, Roy and Dean, versus someone like John Wooden.

John Wooden is in the BHOF as a player, not just as a coach. Great players beat opponents in the moment on the floor.

None of those other great coaches were great players. None of them every really knew what it was like to play at a championship level themselves.

They had been subs on teams and some had been assistants on teams that won rings, or got close.

But there is a another layer of coaching than watching it up close. It is the level of having actually done it and knowing what it is REALLY like to do it.

John Wooden was an incomparably great athlete in his time. He had a level of intensity and competitiveness in the arena at the highest level that none of the other coaches had ever experienced first hand.

Self and the other great coaches I mentioned are some of the greatest coaches EVER. But not a single one of them has ever known what it is like to play at the highest levels a human being can play at. That is a mountain top that only Wooden among the games greatest coaches ever rose to.

Being a great player is for many a great obstacle to being a great coach. They are bored, or frustrated, by the limitations of what lesser players are capable of. Or they are lacking in some of the core skills a great head coach requires, of which there are many.

Wooden was NOT the greatest coach of all time for a very long time. For a very long time he was a stubborn sunnuvabitch determined to do it one way. That was was good enough to become a good college coach, but not a great one. Wooden did not become a great coach until he was about to lose his job in his late 40s and was finally willing to first hire, and then listen to Jerry Norman about the 2-2-1 zone press and about recruiting some players. With the 2-2-1 press, which he furiously resisted, and recruiting, which he barely engaged in even after he let Norman start recruiting, he had a couple of edges that got him the kind of players (a team of great 6-5 and under athletes that the other coaches had passed on as being too small) and the kind of strategic edge that could take him deep in the tournament and let him actually use his first hand experience of recognizing which players really had what it took, and knowing what they were capable of. He understood African Americans athletes for what they were–an untapped resource of competitive fury and in many cases great athleticism. Having been the best of the best as the Indiana Rubber Man, Wooden was not blindered about what really made great players great. It was a combination of great athleticism, worked at relentlessly, with a nuclear furnace of competitive fury within harnessed to taking the highest percentage shots off the hardest to guard 45 degree angle cuts, of doing EVERYTHING not just the UCLA way, but the way only great athletes could do them. Once he had great athletes drilled to the point of doing things in their sleep the way great athletes could do them, then it was all about identifying which could be “at your best when you need your best” and who had “competitive greatness” that could be directed to explode for 40 minutes in a game played so perfectly and with such quickness that lesser athletes and coaches could not keep up even when they knew exactly what was coming. All that Sam Gilbert’s reputed recruiting cash under the table did for Wooden in the years after he had already won two, or 3 rings, was give him essentially as many such players as he wanted, and a lot of top players he could choose among to get those that were not just great talents, but winnow to those that were GREAT ATHLETES. Other coaches had had alumni hiring players the same way that Wooden reputedly (I say reputedly because Wooden was never actually penalized for ANY infraction that I have ever heard of) finally let Norman and Gilbert do for him. Most forget that coaches like Dean Smith and others had some great runs of talent, at the same time that Wooden did, but none of them really knew the 10th tenth of what great players were capable of. They could win a ring or two, when they had a super player, or two, and everything clicked, but Wooden got so he could win a ring every season with the same kind of players the other top programs were signing, increasingly with more, but for one difference. Wooden could pick the ones that were at their best when they needed their best, and that had competitive greatness coursing through their veins in every big game UCLA ever played for 10 or 11 seasons. Wooden took coaching to a whole other level by being able to pick not just the top talent, but the top talent that could rise to competitive greatness when it was needed. Wooden did not need a learning experience after awhile. Wooden already had everything hardwired at the beginning the season. Wooden coached a way to play that great players could play, if they really wanted to submit to playing at 10 tenths of their abilities, if they really wanted to tie their shoe laces the UCLA way, and live the Pyramid of Greatness, and let Wooden reset their shooting mechanics, and run the stuff exactly the way he wanted it run. Wooden said that they didn’t hide what they were going to do, they just practiced till they did it so well with such great athletes that other teams could not stop them. Wooden NEVER had to rebuild a team in midseason EVER in his great run. He looked at his material before the season started and schemed it just right the first time. Wooden was an architect. He had blue prints for each season. He coached many different schemes. Every year it was the same out come. The players were fitted to the scheme from day 1 and they fitted it perfectly, or he got rid of them and had someone else that would fit, if necessary.

Self by comparison is a sculptor, like Henry Moore, or Michelangelo. He sees something possible in the stone and he begins chipping away at it to reveal what may turn out to be. It is not all written with Self from Day 1. Self has a strong vision of something being possible in this gob of material he has, but he begins molding some of it, and chiseling other parts, and fitting pieces here and changing the composition until it is as perfectly balanced and integrated as the parts permit.

Architects are creative creatures, but they draw blue prints of their comprehensive vision and revise those blue prints until they are ready to build the building. The changes during the building are almost never so great as to transform the building into something other than what was envisioned.

Sculptors and painters will sharply alter a composition in process. They are feeling their way along to find what CAN be.

Self is a painter/sculptor kind of a coach. No matter HOW strong of a vision he starts the season with, who we are can morph from one kind of a team into another. It even happens sometimes when he is resisting the evolution with all of his being. He knows that is not who we are, until he can no longer deny who we are is other than what he thought. Usually, then, he becomes completely consumed with this new vision of who we are. This means Self is not playing every game with an optimal, set script and saying see if you can beat us. Self is saying see if you can be what we are given the level of getting better we have achieved now. And sometimes they do.

Interestingly, it is the coaches that are very set in what they have their teams doing that tend to beat him the first time. They are optimized and Self and KU are still trying to find exactly who they are.

You speculate reasonably that this might explain why Self and KU do not win as many rings as titles.

I think it is a factor that comes into play, since Self and KU have faced an apparent embargo (for whatever reason one cares to rationalize) on top talent at the critical 1 and 5 slots.

Self proved in 2008 that when he had as good of talent as anyone, that he could win the ring, even against a team loaded with ringers.

But in the years since, as his MUA in talent has tended to dwindle, he has taken what he had far, but he has not had enough to go all the way, except maybe one season.

I think the talent deficiency has been tougher for him than it was for Wooden.

Wooden’s first two ring teams were, frankly, not teams with all the puzzle pieces. They were instead teams brimming with great athletes of the kind Wooden understand completely. He understood what things they could do in ways that great coaches that were ordinary athletes simply could not grasp.

During the apparent embargo at the 1 and 5, and increasingly the back up positions, Self has shown himself brilliantly resourceful at understanding how coach more and more guys like himself, when he was a player. He has proven brilliant at understanding exactly how players like himself can be blended ingeniously with 2-3 top athletes and playing against Big 12 competition, he can overcome a few failed first meetings and relentlessly get better over a season and in the long haul simply find a superior composition/scheme for his team and walk off with 14 consecutive conference titles.

But at the same time, this approach cannot overcome opponents that are stacked 6 to 10 deep with OADs, and his predilection for getting better after first meeting with a new opponent conspire with hot three point shooting to make his teams vulnerable to upsets by lesser teams.

Self feeds into this dynamic, if you will, by also believing in amping for the better of the two opponents in an NCAA comprised of three two game tournaments. Self amps for the better of the two teams, and coaches his players to find ways to win while laboring for victories against lesser teams. Some upsets result.

But here is the thing: Self probably knows all of the above and is probably working relentless to find a way to get better at the first meetings. He is incredibly resourceful and incredibly determined and my guess is that he will get better at it as Coach K, and Knight and Roy have gotten better at finding ways to compensate in their coaching approaches for never having been great players.

Self can never make himself one of the all time great players and so know first hand what the greatest of the great athletes are truly capable of the way Wooden did.

But I have had a hunch for years that Self is so incredibly resourceful and has so much genius for the strategic aspects of adjusting the schemes of teams, that if he could ever get past this apparent embargo ate the 1 and 5, and get his roster depth back up to snuff, he might through sheer human ingenuity find a bridge across that gap he has in first hand experience of what great players know can be done.

This is why I have so long been kvetching about KU’s recruiting problems at 1 and 5.

This apparent embargo, whether an accidental appearance, or a real contrivance, gets in the way of him trying to find a creative away around his own limitations.

Most late-game strategy is usually to get the ball in the hands of your best scorer and then clear out. Sometimes it is made more difficult with ball screens. I’m not a fan of that, most of the time because ball screens can fail easier at the end, when defense knows it has to stand up. In the least, the screener better have good offense himself, opening for a potential pick and pop/roll or otherwise you just invite a double-team on your #1 scorer.

And then there are the “twists.” Those are the secondary options. So your big scorer is being doubled in his iso and is fighting to drive for shooting space… then he feeds another open shooter to take the winning shot.

@JayHawkFanToo Ya that’s definitely a bad look to force him out. Most of the fans want better for the teams. When they were in their best in the late 90s, early 00s they were winning 10 games a year a lot more often, since his return they have struggled to make it bowl eligible. Most were happy to see Dimmel leave, the question is does Sean take over the offense to proof his worth? Will it be a disaster? CBS ran an article saying Snyder was holding the school hostage, not a good ether.

@drgnslayr Fumble? Shucks, our king of fumble transferred last summer to Arizona State. His fumbling was not at floor level, but rather in the rafters, up above the 7’ mark. (Though I write this with a sense of mirth, I do feel bad for that kid. I hope to see him lift his life together and step back into the path of stardom somewhere soon. Another Jayhawk “what might have been.” I am pulling for him.)

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